


Spatial Reasoning

by howardently



Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-17
Updated: 2015-06-17
Packaged: 2018-04-04 19:19:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4149735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howardently/pseuds/howardently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Distance can be impossible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spatial Reasoning

“Tell me.” He says, and his voice is still velvet smooth against her skin.

“No. It’s stupid.”

“Tell me anyways.”

She clutches the phone a little tighter against her face, the heat from the screen flushing her cheek. Her eyes are shut, and she wants to squeeze them, but it’s easier to see him if her lids stay soft. It’s all easier when she makes herself stay soft.

She still sleeps on the left side of the bed, still keeps that opening on the mattress for when he comes back. It’s stupid, he’s been gone six months already. He’s spent more time not in this bed than he ever did sleeping in it. She can barely even think of it as his bed, even to herself. His bed is some shadowy, negligible thing in some faraway corner of the world. When she pictures it, it’s all sharp angles and shades of gray, like an old film. His bed is grainy in her mind, flickering and popping in eight millimeters.

So she keeps him in hers, tells herself it’s theirs. She keeps her lashes soft against her cheekbones and her eyebrows smooth over her forehead. She imagines his pale skin glowing faintly in the moonlight pouring in from the window. She leaves the shutters open a bit because his skin looks otherworldly in the silver light; he’s a dragon tamed by her fingertips, leather rubbed smooth like stone.

 

“I just worry.” She keeps her voice low; they’re talking in bed, the night pressing in and demanding hush. The fan hums softly above her, its rotation only just quieter than their voices. The cool air stirs against her, and she envisions the way his hair dances just above the pillowcase.

“I know,” he sighs, and she makes herself stay loose enough to feel his billowed breath wash over her face. “I do too. I worry that you’re not eating enough, that you’re walking home alone at night, that you’re not being careful about cars on the bridge way. All those things I’d watch out for…”

“Yeah.” She says, tears trailing hot streaks over the bridge of her nose. She scrubs them away, they’re distracting.

If he was really here, he’d twine his fingers in her hair. He’d pull her close, until his chin bumped against her forehead, until there was nowhere comfortable for her arm to go. If he was really here, she’d strip down to her knickers and throw her leg over his just to feel the coarse hairs against her soft thighs. They’d kiss and kiss and kiss, until she was nothing but his.

But he’s not here, and in her head, she can look all she wants if she’s careful, but she can never touch. He’s fixed in her mind, just beyond her reach. It feels close, it feels like she can count his freckles and track the shifting hues of his eyes, see the puckered scar on his neck from a fishing accident as a boy. It feels like he’s always on the verge of touching her, always reaching. But she can’t ever feel him. God, what she wouldn’t give to feel him once more.

“Tell me what you worry about.” He murmurs, and she has to breathe deeply to stay loose because his voice is so tight.

She breathes into the stillness of the room, breathes until she can feel the mattress vibrating beneath him. Breathes until there’s no tightness in her voice, no hint of the stinging tears.

“I worry you’ll get caught up in some kind of mafia thing, forced to make choices that’ll leave you altered forever.”

He laughs, but it’s low, and she knows he feels the pressure of the night, of the incomprehensible distance between them. She never knew space could be so heavy. She doesn’t laugh back. It’s silly, she knows it’s silly, but it’s equally as real to her as him lying beside her tonight.

“I worry you’ll buy me a necklace in an antique shop, and an insidious evil will slowly start to creep into your life until you’re not you anymore.”

“Girl…” His voice is gravely and deep, and she feels an answering call low in her belly. His eyes change shade in her head, they catch the moonlight differently and seem to glow black.

“I worry you’ll find a door in your building that you find yourself curiously drawn to, that you won’t be able to keep away, and when you go through it, there’ll be a different world on the other side. And you won’t mean to like it, you’ll want to come back to me, but slowly it will start to feel more real to you than reality and you’ll be lost.”

Her heart aches, throbbing painfully at these anxious thoughts. She thinks about this constantly, about all the ways there is to lose him, all the ways that he could disappear even more than he has already. The possibilities seem fathomless, the potential losses too numerous to consider. She’s given up reading fiction; it’s all too frightening at this point. It’s all 1,000 ways to lose the love of your life.

She only reads true crime now. She doesn’t worry about serial killers, or car accidents, or illness. All those are real things, and he’s too illusory for reality.

“You’re so far away, Finn. So far. It feels like it would be so much easier for the intangibles to get you.”

She’s squinting her eyes, and her heart starts to race as he fades from his spot on the right side of the bed. She takes a deep breath, focuses on willing him to come back, to return in whatever form he can. He’s fluid, always shifting shape and form and substance, but she’ll take whatever form of him that will stop this hollowness within her.

“It feels like forever since I’ve seen you. I can’t remember how you smell or how many veins are on the back of your hands. You’re just this side of intangible yourself. One whispered conversation away from being just my imagination.”

The tears come again, and in her head, he looks frustrated by the inability to touch her. His fist balls over his hip.

“Rae.” He says, and his voice is velvet smooth again in the silence, it’s warm against her skin like her tears. “Rae, I love you.”

—

The box arrives with the post a week later. She clutches it to her chest like a baby, like she can push through her skin and muscle and bone and keep him in her body. She box is battered a bit, corners bent in and smudges of black streaking across the surface. She wonders about the adventures it’s been on, the travels it’s taken since it left his hand.

She scurries up the stairs to her flat, drops her stuff on the table beside the door, but carries this to the kitchen and sets it on the counter. She doesn’t talk to it as she puts the kettle on, but only just. If she closes her eyes, she can see him sitting on the counter, his boots bumping against the cabinets below. She doesn’t like that, doesn’t like the sound it makes, so she opens her eyes. She cocks her head and considers the box, considers why summoning him doesn’t always work.

She sends packages more than he does. She tries not to hold it against him, he’s the one who is off on a foreign adventure. He doesn’t have much time for posting things. He sends letters more often, his careless hand heavy over the lines of the paper. He always presses too hard, he can never write on the back side. She likes to imagine that he’s thinking about pressing into her skin as his pen snakes across the page, likes to imagine taking off her clothes and having him write the words with a felt pen onto her paleness. She’s a blank page, an empty canvas, the color seeped completely from her while he’s gone. It’s only his words that write the pink back into her cheeks and the black back into her hair. She doesn’t tell anyone about these things.

She’s sipping her tea. The flat is completely silent, and it makes a throbbing starts around the edges of her skull. She should have put on music, she always puts on music. She doesn’t like the stillness, the way nothing moves at all in the apartment. They used to have a cat, but it left around the same time he did.

She sets down her tea on the counter, and it’s so quiet that the gentle click of the ceramic meeting the countertop is heavy. She wants to sigh, but she doesn’t let herself. So many things feel primarily heavy, and it’s not even her, not even her unwieldy body like it used to be. It’s everything else, the sun shoving against her t-shirt, the sticky sweet smell of the frosting in the bakery next door, the weight of a solitary spoon in the sink for two days. But these are things she has to hide in front of the others, so she practices at home.

She grabs a knife from the drawer and slices open the brown tape sealing the box shut. She draws it slowly down the seam, enjoying the pull as the tape gives under the knife. She has a brief flash of remembrance, of some other time when she appreciated the gentle give of something under a blade, so she quickly cuts through the last of it. She sets the knife on the counter, eyes it distrustfully, then puts it back into the drawer and out of sight.

As soon as she opens the flaps, a wave of Finn scented air emerges, and she has to blink back tears. With her eyes closed, he’s there before her, pressed between her body and the countertop. She shifts closer and he disappears. It’s easier when he’s on the phone.

Rae takes all the items out of the box slowly, reverently, and lays them in a grid on the counter. His red flannel, the upper right, a gray t-shirt below it. The stack of pictures goes on the left, below them a square blue box, and closest to her, a pale grey envelope. She runs her fingers over each offering, studies them in the stillness of the empty flat.

All she can think is Finn Finn Finn Finn Finn Finn Finn.

She picks up the flannel and presses it to her face, breathes in the smell of him, instantly recognized even after all these months. She imagines it’s warm, imagines it’s just come off of his body and been pilfered by her greedy fingers. But she knows it’s not. She folds it carefully and sets it back down in its spot. She picks up the stack of pictures then, shifting through them softly. She can see Finn behind her, looking over her shoulder. She always hated that, but she’d take it now, gratefully.

It’s a whole roll of pictures of him. His face grinning at the camera, him pointing at a statue in a park with his hood drawn over his head. There’s him bending over a turntable, eyebrows furrowed in concentration. There’s his bed, blankets twisted and open, a picture of her on the nightstand. And then, his hands. There’s a dozen pictures of his hands alone. Wrapped around a mug, holding a pen, open palmed and reaching. There’s three of just the backs of his hands, and Rae makes a strangled sound as she traces her finger over the lines of his veins. Four, he’s got four big veins on the back of his hands.

It feels like she’s crying, but when she wipes at her eyes, they’re dry. She feels hot and weightless, untethered from her life. She can’t make sense of anything, what is even real?

She studies the pictures for what could be hours or seconds. Time seems to mean nothing, because it’s measured and abundant. Space, too, is irrelevant because there is so much of it. How can there be so much of all these things that mean nothing? How can the world be so defined by intangibles?

That’s when the tears come. She sets down the pictures, not wanting to harm them with wetness, at least not yet. They have to last five months. She can’t ruin them on the first day. So she lifts the square box from the counter and opens it up.

Inside is a folded piece of stiff paper, white on the outside with dark edges. Rae carefully pulls it out of the box, a shiver running through her. Slowly, she pulls back the paper, one crease at a time, until she’s got what she can now see is a photograph lying open on the counter. It’s a picture of Finn’s open palm, he’s got a freckle just beneath the crease of his thumb.

In the center of the unfolded picture is a thin silver ring, just a narrow band with a line of etched filigree. She picks it up with two fingers, the ridges of her fingerprints rough along the smooth metal. She holds it close to her face, squinting in the dim kitchen to make out what’s carved into the silver. She has to reach over and flick on the kitchen light before she can see that it’s a line of tiny music notes.

It hurts. God, it hurts. It hurts because it’s beautiful, because it looks like her, because he chose her a piece of jewelry while he was far away. It hurts because of what it’s not, too. It’s not forever, it’s not permanent, it’s not him. She slips the band over the ring finger of her left hand anyway. There’s nobody here, so she can pretend. So much of them feels like pretend anyway, even now with all this evidence, with all this proof.

She stares at the ring of silver encircling her finger for a long time, her other hand gripped into the soft cotton of his t-shirt. She shifts her hand back and forth in the light, watching the metal glint. Eventually she takes it off and puts it on her right hand. That hurts too. When she brushes away a tear, she can feel the coolness of the silver against her hot cheeks.

When she looks down again at the picture, she finds herself laughing. Finn’s palm is cradling the ring in the picture, she hadn’t noticed before. But it’s like he understands, like he gets her strange delusions. He can’t be there to open his fist and give her the ring, but he does his best. She takes it off, sets it back into his hand and closes her eyes.

Finn smiles shyly as he offers it, always just on the verge of embarrassed about his sentimentality. She glances from his face to his hand and back again.

“What’s this?” She laughs, feeling pleased and warm and beloved.

“I dunno.” He’d say, then rub the back of his neck. “It’s not a haunted necklace, but it made me think of you.”

Then she’d laugh and reach for him, not to take the ring, but to press her palm against his and draw him close. He’d rub his face against her neck, nuzzle against her ear and she’d sigh in pleasure. She can picture the way his hair would fall over his forehead, the way his arms would wrap around her waist loosely at first, then tighter. She can imagine how he’d slide the ring on and whisper in her ear, “Do you like it?”

But when she opens her eyes, it’s just her, smiling in the kitchen and holding hands with a picture. The ring has left an indentation in the flesh of her palm. She’s holding on to a two dimensional image, and she feels completely two dimensional herself, nothing more than longing trapped on the page. She’s flat and she feels hopeless and hopelessly alone. Rae leaves the ring on the counter and picks up the envelope.

She knows you’re always supposed to read the card first when someone gives you a present, but she’s never abided by that rule. When she was a kid, it was because she was always too impatient to get to the good stuff. But as she got older, as the messages written in those little rectangles became more that just a one-line sentiment, she’d learned to savor them instead. If she could build herself a castle out of words, sturdy and fortified by all the kind things people have said, Finn’s words would be the most prominent of all. They’d be the buttresses, the braces supporting the heaviest walls.

She pulls the card from the envelope, runs her fingers over his script with unfocused eyes. She flips the card over, then frowns when she finds it blank. So few words, so little to sustain her across the distance. Rae wipes at her face and focuses on the card.

Rae,

We are real, girl. We may be half a world apart, but this thing with you is more real to me than the building I work in, than the strangers on the train beside me, than the music pulsing through the studio doors. There’s no intangible in us. You’re as much a part of me as my ribs or my hands or my heart. So even if I forget the freckle below your collarbone, it won’t matter because you’re here with me through every breath and every tear and every faltering smile to someone who doesn’t know me because they don’t know you. There’s nothing tangible if we aren’t tangible.

But here are some things to remind you, just the same.

Love forever,

Finn

She doesn’t bother fighting the tears anymore, doesn’t bother trying to stand up against the press of space, against the irrefutable crush of gravity. It’s all intangibles, all concepts that don’t make sense while he’s away. She scoops up all his gifts, pulls them against her chest like she would with him, and slides against the cabinets to the floor.

She presses his flannel to her lips, breathing him deep into her lungs, drying her tears against the soft fabric. And it’s there, trying to hold herself in the third dimension, that the world seems to shift in a sudden moment of clarity.

The photographs scatter to the floor as she rises to her feet, resolute and steady for the first time in a long time. She picks up the ring and slips it onto her ring finger, but leaves the rest as she strides from the room. She doesn’t turn the music on, but this time, the stillness is a reassuring counterpart to the lists that run through her head.

—

Years later, she’d smile to herself when something would bring recollections of that tiny, abandoned flat to her mind. She’d remember the flowered curtains, think fondly of the little cactus that had rested on the windowsill and the smell of the bread from the patisserie next door. But all those things have become faded photographs in her mind, tinged with yellow and worn around the edges. Whereas the veins in his hands are the palest of blues when she runs her fingers over them in bed at night, steady and concrete beneath her.


End file.
